Rough Set Methods for Attribute Clustering and Selection

In this study we investigate methods for attribute clustering and their possible applications to the task of computation of decision reducts from information systems. We focus on high-dimensional datasets, that is, microarray data. For this type of data, the traditional reduct construction techniques either can be extremely computationally intensive or can yield poor performance in terms of the size of the resulting reducts. We propose two reduct computation heuristics that combine the greedy search with a diverse selection of candidate attributes. Our experiments confirm that by proper grouping of similar-in some sense interchangeable-attributes, it is possible to significantly decrease computation time, as well as to increase a quality of the obtained reducts (i.e., to decrease their average size). We examine several criteria for attribute clustering, and we also identify so-called garbage clusters, which contain attributes that can be regarded as irrelevant.